When Everything Went Wrong: 10 Real Stories of Inventors Who Didn't Give Up!

By Max Temporelli, Barbara Gozzi and Agnese Innocente

Did you know? Some of the world's greatest inventions started off as failures! Inventions like Coca-Cola, shoes, and vacuum cleaners were actually mistakes. Told in a mixture of comic panels and prose, this gorgeous book shares the stories of 10 of these fabulous inventions.
Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed once at making a light bulb, I have simply found ninety-nine ways of not making ones.” In When Everything Went Wrong, readers will read about 10 inventors who persevered. Making mistakes doesn't mean you failed . . . it's all part of the process!

Inventors included in this book are:

• Thomas Edison
• Jan Matzeliger
• Guglielmo Marconi
• Wilson Greatbach
• James Dyson
• Margarete Steiff
• Stephanie Louis Kwolek
• Charles Goodyear
• Percy Spencer
• John Stith Pemberton

Kids will love all the fun facts and true stories in this book, told in both prose and comic form!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
• Release date: May 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781524888466

Book preview

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Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was very curious and a highly accomplished inventor. But did you know that inventing the light bulb was very hard for him?

Thomas Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. His ears did not function well, and due to his partial deafness, he would struggle to follow lessons in class. He couldn’t hear many low sounds, like the noise made by his six brothers! So his mother taught him at home, and Thomas learned to concentrate. At age 11, he had his own chemistry laboratory in the Edisons’ cellar.

One day he saw a child playing beside the train tracks and grabbed him before a train passed. The child was saved! The child’s father was the stationmaster, and as a way to thank Thomas, he taught him how to use the telegraph, which was an early version of a phone. Thomas immediately fell in love with it! At 17, he improved upon how the telegraph sent messages, and at 29, he had laboratories built in New Jersey, where he started new tests and inventions with his assistants.

Thomas loved to constantly explore and design, even if, sometimes, years would pass before an invention worked! Among his many ideas, he invented the phonograph (the first device to record and reproduce sounds), the mimeograph (an ancestor of the printer), and the kinetoscope (a precursor to the film projector). However, inventing the light bulb proved tricky . . . and Thomas